"The extent of the church's complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentinian navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship's political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio's name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment"

Apparently, he never said he was a Jew - he just gave his first name as Dudu, which was his nickname. He just left out that he was Arab. As to the comparison to passing, many Israeli Jews and Arabs look alike racially, stemming from the same semitic race, especially the mizrahi. And most if not nearly all Israeli Arabs, a/k/aPalestinian citizens of Israel, speak perfect Ashkenazi Hebrew, with no accent. A friend of mine who is Israeli Arab, whose name is both Jewish and Arab, told me about a time he was at a party in Israel, and one of the Israeli Jewish guests kept going on and on about how he didn't like Arabs; so my friend kept asking specific questions as to why he didn't like them. Eventually, the Jewish guy asked him, "why do care about the Arabs so much?" - and when my friend told him he was Arab, the guy was completely stunned.

So not sure if passing is exactly the correct term to use, although the racist verdict in Israeli court yielded the same results.